Canada has an opportunity to redefine its role in the Pacific

As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney touches down in Tokyo this week, he steps onto a geopolitical chessboard that has been radically reconfigured since the last time a Canadian leader sought to deepen ties in the Indo-Pacific.

The liberal international order that Ottawa once navigated with ease has fractured. In its place is a cold, hard realism defined by the return of great power rivalry and the transactional “America First” doctrine of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

Carney, a technocrat with a reputation for intellectual seriousness, arrives seeking to revitalize Canada’s stagnant economy through a trade and economic security agreement with Japan. But if he expects his counterpart, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, to be merely a partner in diversification away from the United States, he is misreading the room. For Tokyo, the value of Canada is not just in its resources, but in its utility to the central pillar of Japanese survival: the U.S.-Japan security alliance.